


something moving on the surface

by thalassashells



Category: Armored Core (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon, i didnt play that one!, i guess it might not be post canon for ac5, theres no gays in the first chapter but give me time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 13:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18918151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thalassashells/pseuds/thalassashells
Summary: Arteria Cranium stands and ORCA lies in ruin. Wynne D. Fanchon is on her last legs. Fiona Janderfeldt picks up a distant, flickering life signal. The world keeps turning.





	something moving on the surface

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in a mad fervor. if the lore is wrong sorry i fact checked as much as i could. it was written literally like 5 hours after i finished 4 answer i was so overcome. anyway thanks if you read this? does anyone check the armored core ao3 tag in 2019

The Cranium stands. Strayed and Shinkai are scattered, limbs broken and fused to the ground. If their pilots are alive, they won’t be for long. Shinkai’s laser blade is melting through the floor and bathing the room in purple sparks, choking the air with Kojima particles. 

Otsdarva is still limping. 

Wynne Fanchon stands her ground. 

His heaving breath comes through the communication feed as static, only recognizable as human due to the uneven stuttering. Stasis creaks and crumbles beneath him no matter how far he tries to force the controls. Another leg cable snaps.

“Stand down.” Wynne commands, though Reiterpallasch is in no state to oppose him. She prays her calm demeanor is enough to hide that the damage he’d done to her spinal cable had fully disabled her limb controls. Her sights only glow on battery backup.

“You’ve taken it all from us, Wynne.” Ostdarva hisses as Stasis’s knees give out from under him. The screech of metal on metal brings the pounding in her head to a blinding height.

“I’ve given the cradles their lives back.” She pants.

“You don’t—when – up.” Otsdarva tries one last time to repremaind her as his transmitter gives out for good. Stasis gives one last shuttering pump of smoke and sinks together, a lifeless heap of metal. 

Wynne doesn’t feel much more alive.

You don’t know when to give up, he’d said. He could be right. The cradles could fall anyway – a loose screw or a neglectful mother who doesn’t care to grease the hinges. But it wouldn’t be today. Today, humanity milled about the clouds as they had for a hundred years. The generation who has never seen the ground will keep their eyes fixed up and ahead, looking at the cosmos from where earthbound men had once looked for God. That was her answer. 

She blinks away the static in her vision that look all too much like screen-shadow imprinted on her retinas. Reiterpallasch’s cockpit only has the thin outlines of emergency lighting. A series of yellow and red lights warn her with increasing fervor that the air filtering system has failed. It might be romantic to breath Earth’s air one more time if it wasn’t going to coat her lungs in soot within two days.

She cracks open the cockpit anyway to let the stagnant air out. The air outside is full of dust and smoke, cooling in the desert night that blankets the northern hemisphere for most of a 24 hour cycle. The Cranium has no reason to be insulated, nobody was walking freely in its halls. 

Wynne unbuckles her dozen safety straps to sink more comfortably into her seat. She tries to imagine what the League will say when reporting to the cradles. ORCA plot foiled? Rogue Lynx bravely taken down by new ORCA allies? She couldn’t know what would happen in the conference rooms, what social statistics would be taken into account behind closed doors. Wynne had no family, no girlfriend to notify. It could hardly concern her.

So she counts, starting at one, and sinks into sleep. 

White Glint’s head rolls up with the blackened tide, battered and dented as any other piece of debris lining the rocky Pacific shore . Fiona squints into the sight of her stolen Normal, placing the headpiece between her cross-hairs. Once the tide reaches a low ripple she orders the shoulder weapons to fire harpoons, perfectly piercing the elongated nose of White Glint and dragging her to land. She beats down the part of her heart that aches seeing the final piece join her pile, stung with the childish belief that she night also be able to pull her pilot out of the sea. 

The closest she comes to pulling life out of these waters is a half rotted fish with growths that severed their fins from their bodies and clogged their gills. If anything stayed alive in these oceans, she wasn’t ready to meet it. 

Fiona pulls her gas mask from the back of the cockpit and fits it to her face. It covers most of her head, buckling three ways over the back and around her neck. Once fully fastened the battery powered radiation shield activated. It was designed to break after about ten uses – courtesy of Omer, who would happily replace them for 75% of the original price – but she had worked around the ever degrading software. Being a NEXT operator for independent mercenaries required voiding some warranties. 

Her current home is in a bunker just ahead of the spread of high tide. Most of it continued under the ocean, connecting to GA’s old oil rigs. She stayed in the workers quarters where the radiation shielding would still protect her at a certain depth, encouraging any borders to carefully consider when and how they intended to leave. Even with her own radiation suit, she finds it difficult to believe that she’s lucky. 

As she descends the ladder into the bunker she hears an unusual noise: her makeshift signal interceptor is speaking. 

She scrambles down the rest of the ladder and barely waits for the bulkhead to seal above her before tearing her mask and gloves off. The touch screen had been busted since she arrived, leaving her to tune the dials only intended for maintenance to receive a clear signal. 

ID: Reiterpallasch. Neutralized. - ID: Strayed. Neutralized – ID: Stasis. Neutralized. - ID: Shinkai. Neutralized.- Arteria Cranium has neutralized all –

The signal fizzles into inaudible static. She hurriedly composes a request to Arteria Cranium’s AI for a report on all life signs.

A minute passes that feels like a year for a computer that can parse messages faster than any human could write them. 

Cradle support maintained. Ground support maintained. One human life sign. All corporate property is –

One human life sign. Fiona launches from her seat to grab the only other suit and mask available, stuffing them in her backpack and running back to her Normal. Night falls in her corner of the continent, though the sun can only barely pierce the constant cover of smoke in Northwest America. It diffuses on the distant horizon into different muddy grays, like someone had sloshed the sunset with their leftover paint bucket. Fiona wonders if there’s anywhere on earth that you can still see the pinks and blues in the old photographs.

Fiona climbs into the cockpit and pulls the tight sheild down over her. The dashboard is simple, wholly unlike the technical marvel of White Glint who now lay in chunks. The whole cockpit would need remodeling. A little voice in her head wonders if it would be better for the final pilot to have died by the time she arrived, but disgust crushes it in an instant.

“Provide ETA and map for coordinates 38.36 degrees North and -92.45 degrees East.” She enunciates every numeral as clearly as possible. 

“ETA: Three hours. Map generated.” The AI announces flatly. Fiona wishes she had her own operator, someone to lean on should the AI fail. It would have to do for now. Every step of every day relied on what had to be done.

She kicks the boosters into action and focuses dead ahead on her map to suppress the oncoming motion sickness. Outside, the smog engulfs her like a blindfold, leaving nothing but soft and deadly gray swirling outside the windows.


End file.
